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About the project

Many of us are constantly in possession of technologies allowing us to make recordings, whether that is the sound of our child’s first music concert on a digital camera or capturing a practical joke on a mobile phone. There are many outlets for this user generated content. 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Mainstream news bulletins often use amateur footage of dramatic events and some TV programmes entirely consist of user generated content. The sound quality of such content is often poor: distorted, noisy, with garbled speech or indistinct music. Our interest lies in the causes of poor quality. Typical problems include: speaking off microphone; distorted speech; wind noise and microphone handling noise.

We want to improve recording quality so that user-generated audio can be more widely used. To do this we will develop an understanding of how recording errors are perceived, as it is unclear how noise and distortion affects the perception of audio quality for many sounds. We will also develop algorithms for automatically evaluating quality. This three year EPSRC project commenced in april 2012, and partnered with the University of Salford team, is BBC R&D and The British Library Sound Archive.

Very interesting project. I record live concert performances to show the quality of our events. I’ve learned to focus on audio quality with the images just to confirm it is the artist actually playing – to avoid the pirating of audio by other musicians. Finding a good quality audio recorder these days is pretty tricky!

@Jane Mcintosh Thanks Jane, Interestingly we are currently carrying out an study which looks at comparing recordings of live concert performances to see what people like and dislike about different aspect of the audio. the link is here if you have any time to take part: http://www.goodrecording.net/qualitube/

This is a very interesting project. Is there any way I can get my degree students to contribute? Also, do you have any recommendations for mobile phone applications that might utilise error judgement to produce useable audio recordings with standard mobile phone microphones?